Sometimes you come across a novel that is just right. It has all the bits you're looking for and it's interesting and funny and creative, and you read it over and over. King's Blood Four is like this. The first published novel of Sheri S. Tepper, and the first in the True Game trilogy, it's the kind of book you can dive into.
Peter is a schoolboy. He lives in one the of Houses in Schooltown, learning how to play the True Game. Some people are pawns, people who live and work and are used up by the Game. Some people are Gamesmen, who manifest talents sometime in their teens and must learn how to play the Game of be destroyed. The talents define what kind of Gamesman you are, perhaps a Demon, able to read thoughts, perhaps a Sorceror, able to store and release power. Every child in schooltown has the potential to be a Gamesman, pawns are not taught about the game.
Peter is a foundling, born nine months after festival and left on the doorstep. He finds chooltown boring and the other students largely annoying, except for his friend Yarrel, and the cook, Chance. His only other friend is Prince Mandor, who he spends time with despite it being forbidden. Many things are forbidden to students, and Gaming is forbidden in schooltown.
When festival comes, Peter is with Mandor when he challenges King Mertyn, head of schooltown, to Game. Mandor sacrifices Peter into the Game, used like a pawn, burned with power from a Sorceror. When Peter wakes up, he finds that Mandor was taken away by his allies, also badly burned, worse than Peter. King Mertyn decides that he must be sent away, and puts Peter into the trust of Chance and Yarrel, to go to the Seer Windlow, who had been Mertyn's teacher.
As they sail away, the captain of the ship realises they are being followed by pawners, those who are hired to find and kidnap people for use in Games. It becomes clear that they are chasing Peter, but he finds it hard to believe, he is only a student, untalented. They seek refuge in the land of the Immutables. Pawns who are immune to talents, and around whom talents do not work. Riddle, the leader of the Immutables, tells them he wants them gone from their land, and sends his daughter Tossa with them as a guide.
As they reach the edge of the territory, their pursuers catch them up and Tossa is wounded with an arrow. They flee across the river and Peter remembers that on their map, it said that there was a Healer nearby. He runs to the place and falls through rotted flooring into an underground chamber, finding some old games pieces and a book, which he takes without thinking. He discovers three Gamesmen, the Healer Silkhands, the Witch Dazzle and the Herald Borold. Through a trick he persuades Silkhands to come with him, but it is too late, Tossa is dead. Silkhands explains that even if she weren't, she was an Immutable, and could not be healed with talent.
Silkhands and Peter find that Dazzle and Borold have left to go to the Bright Demesne, home of the Wizard Himaggery. As they are all headed South anyway, Silkhands joins them and they agree to go to the Bright Demesne. When they arrive, the pawners who chased them are there and Himaggery sends them away. But he also decides to send Silkhands to Windlow with the Peter. He wants Windlow to come to the Bright Demesne, but Windlow is with the High King Prionde, who won't let him go. Prionde is a suspicious man and Himaggery hopes that a Healer will be allowed in where another wouldn't.
While Peter is talking with Himaggery, he sees Dazzle as she really is, scarred and damaged from a wound when she was younger, but she has hidden it with Beguilement, the talent of Rulers that Witches have to a lesser degree, and not even she knows that it is there. Dazzle is a bitter and wicked woman, who seeks always to harm her sister Silkhands from jealousy.
Peter and his friends travel to the High King and are finally allowed to go to the little valley where Windlow lives. Windlow has ideas that are radical, and possibly heretical. He argues that all talents come from the original eleven talents, that all Gamesmen have one or more of them, the ones with only one talent having it in greatest power, those with more than one with less of each.
He also believes in history, having spent most of his life searching for a book, the Onomasticon, which he believes has a true history of the time of the first eleven. Soon Prionde sends soldiers to imprison them in the old tower, having been fed lies by Dazzle, who followed them. While they all sit in the tower, Peter remembers the games pieces and brings them out to play with. Windlow reacts strongly, calling them the Gamesmen of Barish, and when he sees the book, it is the Onomasticon. At once he decides they must escape, which they do through a convenient tunnel.
They decide upon a plan to evade their pursuers. Windlow gives them each a leaf, which they will sit down and chew at midday. It will help them to become one with their surroundings, confounding the tracking of the Demon behind them. Meanwhile they will all split up, so that if one is caught the rest won't be.
It almost works, everyone escapes except Peter. When he is caught, a Demon tells him that they are going to Bannerwell, home of Mandor. The Demon is Huld, Thalan to Mandor, the brother of Mandor's mother, which is a clsoe bond. He tells Peter that King Mertyn is Peter's Thalan, that he read it in Mertyn's mind during the Game, when he saw Peter threatened. This means that he is no foundling, but the son of Mavin Manyshaped, the famous shifter who, it is said, can even shift into the shape of another Gamesman, but not everyone believes it.
When Peter sees Mandor again, Mandor is like Dazzle, burned and scarred, but no one else sees it because of the Beguilement. Mandor cannot be healed, because a wound left too long wiill be accepted by the mind and resist healing. He plans instead to lure Mavin to him and force her to take on his shape and his mind, so that he can be whole again in a new body. nPeter is filled with despair, and after trying to throw himself off the top of the castle, he is imprisoned in a dungeon.
At the Bright Demesne, Windlow and Silkhands, Yarrel and Chance have arrived and everyone realises that Peter must have been captured. The entire force of the Bright Demesne is thrown into finding him, and Himaggery summons Mertyn from school town. When Mertyn arrives, he learns about the Bright Demesne and what they do. They do not Game. They seek a thing that has long been lost, which the Game and the rules of the Game has almost detroyed, they seek justice.
They begin the journey to Bannerwell to challenge Mandor to Game, knowing that what he plans is an abomination and he is too evil to leave alone, and they must also rescue Peter. They send Silkhands, Yarrel and Chance on ahead to try and contact Peter within the castle, but Dazzle arrives there too and spreads more lies about Silkhands.
Peter is walking to the torture chamber with a Divulger named Grimpt, chewing on one of Windlow's leaves to help him with what is coming, when he realises that he is Grimpt. He kills the real Grimpt, and understands that desperation and Windlow's herb have allowed his talent to come through, the talent of Shifting. He makes it outside and changes again, creating a vacant eyed pawnish boy called Swallow, and keeps his head down for the next few days in the disguise. When he sees Yarrel and Chance in the courtyard, he takes them where he sleeps and tell them who he really is.
Chance is overjoyed to see him safe, but Yarrel turns on him. Yarrel believes that Peter is no longer the same person, and mistrusts him. The truth is that Yarrel is a pawn, sent to schooltown with lies in order to keep him safe and to learn about how to survive in the Game. Years ago, his beloved sister was killed by a Shifter, used up in the Game, and now he hates them all.
Peter comes up with a plan to get the two of them out of the castle so that they can go to the Immutables and ask them to come. They all know that there will be a Great Game between Himaggery and Mandor, and Peter hopes to stop it. He manages to find Silkhands just in time to prevent her from being tortured, and they run into the tombs beneath Bannerwell to hide.
The searchers are getting close to their hiding spot when Peter drops the Gamesmen of Barish, and while gathering them up, he holds onto Dorn, first Necromancer. Dorn enters his mind and summons the dead of Bannerwell, frightening away the searchers, and Peter and Silkhands finally sleep.
When they wake up, there is a strange woman sitting in the middle of the room, knitting. She lectures Peter, explaining that the Gamesmen of Barish were created by the Wizard Barish, many years ago, and they contain the pattern of the first people to have each of the eleven talents. Her knitting turns into two youths as she scurries up the wall and out, telling him she is Mavin Manyshaped and the youths are two of his cousins. He pushes Silkhands out the hole as well and stays to decide what to do.
Prionde has arrived, thinking that Windlow is there because he knows Peter is, but quickly allies himself with Mandor, so when Himaggery arrives he confronts them both. He uses a new technique to pull power from the Bright Demesne and destroys the walls of Bannerwell and most of the two armies. Peter has decided that he will meet Mandor on his own terms, and holds the Gamespiece of Trandilar, first Queen. Then he raises the dead of Bannerwell and walks out of the tombs.
The Game is over, but then Riddle arrives, and it is decided that some of the Immutables will stay at Bannerwell, to guard Mandor and Huld. The rest of them return to the Bright Demesne.
Peter thinks long about justice, and pawns, and he wonders if they can make a world where Yarrel will be his friend again.